Games worth discovering

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora shows that Ubisoft has learned some of Elden Ring’s lessons

4K View2023-12-20

One of this year’s most pleasant surprises for me has been Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. Over the past few years, I’ve counted myself among the critics of Ubisoft’s open-world format, which I think has grown increasingly stale with each new Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry game the massive publisher has launched. Imagine my surprise when, while working on our Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora review, TapTap chief editor Kef sent me a message saying, “Hey, this game seems really good!”

Turns out, he was right—Frontiers of Pandora is really good, and not because it discards Ubisoft’s established format. It doesn’t—not entirely, anyway. Instead, Frontiers of Pandora leans in on what Ubisoft is already good at and makes it better by taking a couple design lessons from Elden Ring and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

If you’ve been following this stuff for a while, you’ll no doubt catch the irony here. Back when Elden Ring launched, it saw near-universal acclaim. There were a few holdouts online, though. Several game developers took issue with Elden Ring’s user interface, including at least one prominent developer from Ubisoft. Unlike most other open-world games, Elden Ring’s UI refuses to show you around. There are no bright compass markers or light-up pathways guiding you toward the next point of interest or leg of the journey.

You’ve got to find your own way. It’s a design principle that Elden Ring’s designers saw used in Breath of the Wild, which gives players the freedom to follow their own path to Hyrule Castle.

Elden Ring makes its journey fun with its brilliantly designed world, which allows you to see castles and mountaintops far out in the distance. By spotting these major landmarks and cross-referencing them with the game’s hand-drawn map, you can plot out a theoretical course—always with the understanding that something is bound to waylay you on your journey there. It’s a simple system that prevents Elden Ring from ever feeling like you’re being shuffled from one point of interest to another, and it encourages players to keep their eyes on the environment rather than on a list of quest objectives or map markers.

Contrast this with most of Ubisoft’s open-world output over the past ten years, whether that’s Far Cry, Assassin’s Creed, Ghost Recon, or Watch Dogs. There’s always a big map to uncover piece by piece (either by climbing radio towers or finding sync points), a list of main quest objectives to complete, and a long list of low-stakes side activities to do in each zone.

Most importantly, for our purposes at least, is that there’s always something telling you where to go next—a minimap with a glowing objective, a marker in the UI’s built-in compass, an on-screen counter tracking your progress. Individually, it’s easy to see how each of these elements is meant to help the player. Together, though, they fight for your attention like a bunch of rowdy kids in the back seat on a family vacation, and keep you from being able to settle into the world. They’re immersion breaking.

Does Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora completely flip the script on the “Ubisoft formula”? Not by any means. However, it does pull back from this overly busy UI design to allow the stunning world of Pandora’s Western Frontier to take center stage. What’s more, it’s possible to play in “explorer” mode, a toggleable option that shuts off most of the UI-based guidance and forces you to instead rely on verbal directions from characters and visible landmarks to make your way to most objectives.

Playing this way, I found that my attention stayed focused on the world of Pandora itself, which deserves to be the star of the show. Massive trees reach up into the jungle canopy, and giant root systems sprawl across the forest floor and provide a natural highway system for the Na’vi to travel along. At night, the forest is lit with bioluminescent plants and animals that cast a purple-green neon glow over the jungle floor.

With my focus on the gorgeous world around me, I’ve noticed something remarkable: there’s a kind of hidden geography revealing itself to me as I play. When I first emerged from the RDA facility where my Na’vi character had been kept in hibernation, I looked out at a dense, undifferentiated mass of jungle. Now that I’ve spent hours running through the forest, observing the plants and animals that live in it, I can see pathways and traps that used to be invisible to me.

There are the huge root “highways” I mentioned before, for example. Small blue blossoms that grow on these roots cover me in a coat of energizing pollen that boosts my speed, and now I spot these plants on the forest floor too. I know to avoid the bulbous green pods that explode when they’re threatened, and that the large waxy leaves of certain trees can break my fall if I need to run over a cliff edge.

All this is possible because Frontiers of Pandora is willing to back off the usual aggressive signposting and breadcrumbing that usually feature in Ubisoft’s games. Again, the game still has a lot of what makes a Ubisoft game a Ubisoft game: There are still camps to clear out and samey activities to complete across the map. There’s even a global pollution meter that fills up as you get rid of human industrial facilities in the area. But all that stuff has been pushed back into the background now, it’s not all competing for my attention at the same time. That’s allowed Pandora to really come alive for me in a way Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla’s England or Watch Dogs Legion’s London never quite did.

If you’re just about to start out with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, I recommend trying the explorer mode first—you can always change back to the more traditional guided view if it doesn’t work for you. But playing in explorer mode has certainly enhanced my experience, and I hope Ubisoft continues to offer modes like this in future games.